THE MAORI MYSTERY.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIV, Issue 9394, 15 March 1909, Page 2

THE MAORI MYSTERY.

Under the above heading the Auckland Weekly News thus ontioiaea the Maori land policy o$ *s® Mmisfc:ry . Were it not of such deadly ance to the people of this DommiM, to workmen employed, as L business and professional Men, to the overburdened taxpayers who jook anxiously for some prospect ol: relief, as well as to disappointed landaeek ers who vainly ask to be allowed to tSn waste and idle lands into wealth '• producfng farms, we could enjoy the sardonic hnmonr of that comedy, the Maori Land Mystery •For it is, indeed, one ol those astounding mysteries which arise only where the acts ot human beings are utterly unreasonable and where there is quite no intelligible explanation of their actions. In Tanmarnnni, for example, we have a state ) of government which would disgrace the 8 Esquimaux and puzzle the Chinese. At an immense bv virtue of heavy taxation, nnlimi ■ ted credit, and the P™ctical onment of the dozen other Northern railway schemes so urgently called for we drove a railway through the Kine Country and made connection hefeen AncLand and Wellington Bv so doing we transformed pillions oi r acres of inaccessible country ioto "rXay land” add made .tposmble for onr British settlers to tarn the interior of onr North Island into fertile field, th ri ving town9hip,. a populous countryside. Yet we left great tracts of country, immediately adioining the railway m the hands blithe natives and to the amazingly illogical law which JhefoUyot onr legislafcors has noaed In Tanmarnnni, which is only hne point of the huge area Silarlv abated, is being carried on wholly for the benefit of Maori owners and without any power of rating upon any land excepting that leased to Europeans. The British settler who steams cat of Auckland or Wellington to he left by the train in that extraordinary country finds that his fate is to pay rents to Maori Boards, for shortterms leases, at values made bythe national expenditure, to he s^anri to a Department m which inflnenoes are dominant and to he utterly unable to carry on local government which is the instinct of British people or to build up the- prosperity and progress which is the laudable British ambition. Nor does it appear that the individual Maori benefits in the slightest degree by this pernicious and unpardonable policy. For the Maori who wants to work hard and to take all possible advantage of Enropaen civilisation Anas himself denied all right to act upon his own initiative and seems not to be able even to obtain hia share of the rents thus filched from the Iq B Orakei, close to Auckland Oitfy, we have an equally preposterous state of affairs, the Native Minister actually telling us that the ptpper course to pursue is to the land upon short-term leases for suburban residence sites—thus for the perpetual benefits of a mere handful of Maori owners, who form a strange local blend between millionairedom and panperdom. And at the very moment when the King Oonntry Is looked against settlement, when Tanxnarunui cannot levy rates or provide decent township conveniences, when Orakei is being planned by Cabinet Ministers as a suburban gold mine for idling natives, the cry of the Unemployed has been raised in the streets of Auckland, and the Prime Minister has been explaining the attitude of the Government in encouraging immigration. And why is it that we cannot encourage British immigration? Why is it that in this sparsely-popu-lated country less than a million British settlers are found too many? The reason is plain. There are unemployed in Auckland because in the Nothern Peninsula and on the East uoast, in the Waikato and in the King Oonntry, vast areas of Native Land, situated on railways built by tbe Government, on roads for which settlers have been rated, are looked up against that production of raw material which is the very life blood of the towns. And there will be unemployed in Auckland and all over the* Dominion so long as we except the preposterous idea that the British settler has no rights in New Zealand, and that he exists here, with his roads and his railways and all his civilisation, merely to enable Maori landowners to live in idleness upon rents and charges. We have no ill will whatever to the Maori people, who have no worse friend than the misguided individual who are so sedulously following a modified form of the old Kingite tactics of looking up tbe land. But the time has come when plain speaking is necessary in order that the rising feeling of the country may be understood by those who are responsible for the present state of affairs. Nothing but evil can come of any deliberate locking up of the Native Lands; and nothing hut illwill can oome of any attempt to make the British settler a mere tenant of Native landlords. Workmen who have no work have only to exorcise their intelligence to see that were these looked-up lands brought into use, there would be work for all for many years to come, apart from all other industrial questions. Every taxpayer in the Dominion ought to realise that the railways built from loans and calling for annual interest, and the roads built by heavy local ratds and Government subsidies, are largely wasted owing to the Native Lands they pass through, which pay no rates, are held for State made values, and lie as an incubus upon the prosperity of tbe Dominion. The mistakes of the past we cannot easily rectify, hut the mistakes of the present we can end at once, particularly that .fundamental mistake which allows Native Land to block settlement in districts made accessible by great public expenditure, and which makes the British settler, even in railway townships. practically the bondsman of the Maori.